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A Clear Blue Sky

Page 20

by Jonny Bairstow


  My approach to wicketkeeping is a minor variation of my approach to batting. I see the ball; I catch the ball. Though only those who don’t do the job still think of it as being that simple. In South Africa, for example, I’d been standing just a little wide, the weight transferring too heavily on to my left foot. I had to adjust. I’ve gradually changed my technique as challenges to it have cropped up, always making calibrated adjustments to manage them. For a while I used the half-squat, which has become known as the power position. Then I went back to the old-school full-squat. I became less static, developing more movement in the way I kept too.

  At Headingley, I wanted Frenchy to go through the mechanics of everything with me again in the same way that Ian would look at my batting.

  Frenchy dragged out what looks like a bowling machine set up at floor-level. The ball comes out of it at anywhere from 50 to 55 miles per hour. He stood in front of me with a miniature bat, making it harder to guess whether the delivery would come straight through or take a snick. He’d later hurl a ball into a ridged, sloping board, which would send me diving everywhere – high, low, at full-length sideways and upwards, like someone possessed. There was also a session with the slip cradle, the design of which hasn’t fundamentally changed since its invention before the last war. Frenchy slung balls into it and I stood at close range. He peppered me with catches that came very fast and very hard.

  I’ve been through practices during which I’ve felt as though medieval torture would have been easier to handle. Once, in India, the day was hot enough to melt metal. If I made a mistake, I had to take off all my kit – gloves, inners, pads, box – and then put them all back on again, beginning from scratch. I hated it.

  Nothing nonetheless was more arduous than my day with Frenchy. I got angry and frustrated with myself, with the drills, with everything. I was catching balls on my left hip … my right hip … with a single hand … with both hands. I was thinking about my natural foot movement … the dives I had to make … holding on to the ball as my elbow jarred against the grass. The lonely sound of the ball against the cradle, off the board or from the bat and into my gloves echoed around the ground. The other noise came from the strangled shouts I made whenever I dropped or couldn’t get near a catch. At the end my palms throbbed, my fingers stung. I was soaked to the skin too.

  When I came into the England team I was always being asked to the point of tedium whether I ‘really’ wanted to be a wicketkeeper as well as a batsman. It was as though no one had noticed or taken seriously the work I’d already put in to make myself one. I got tetchy about it, sometimes barely suppressing my incredulity that anyone would think I didn’t want the gloves. On that filthy day, the practice over at last, I walked towards our dressing rooms – wet, exhausted, achy – wishing that anyone who had ever put the question to me could have been there and seen every second of the previous three hours. Only a masochist – or someone who wanted to be a wicketkeeper very much – would have pushed themselves that hard.

  The number of Test runs I scored during 2016 eclipses in the public mind the number of dismissals I claimed because catches and stumpings will always be less glamorous than hundreds. You rarely get a headline for taking a leg-side edge or two – only for dropping one. But I know every successful day I had in the field could be traced back to that session with Bruce French.

  Wicketkeeping is an extreme physical and mental challenge. In 12 months, during 17 Tests played in locations as diverse as Manchester and Visakhapatnam, I did more than 17,000 squats. I encountered some pitches where the ball came into my gloves with a hammer-like thump and others where I had to take it in front of my shins. Sometimes the variation in a bowler’s wrist position is minimal but critical; even Jimmy Anderson doesn’t always know what a delivery will do when it leaves his hand. So I, like the batsman, have a split second to decide where to go, calculating line, length and speed, doing so sometimes when the flight path of the ball is partly obscured. One of more than half-a-dozen things can happen to it in the air or off the pitch. Preparing yourself for each of them is a constant battle.

  Frenchy designed our work to cope with that. My confidence improved. So did my concentration. Against Bangladesh in Chittagong, where the temperature was up towards the mid-30s, the ball turned prodigiously on a dusty pitch that was as hard as a stone-slabbed floor. Each innings was a long examination of patience, endurance, hand–eye coordination and the fundamental skills of standing up to the wicket. I passed it, thanks to that miserably damp day at Headingley. And because I felt better about my wicketkeeping, I also felt better about my batting – and vice versa.

  My dad was superstitious to a slavish degree that he called ‘ridiculous’. Everything had to be done as a trinity. He’d pat the ground three times. He’d slam his bat into the block hole three times. He’d fiddle at his gloves three times. For a while he carried a lucky medallion, which a stranger had given him in a pub. I’m not usually like that, but I confess I was reluctant to change either my gloves or my inners, however tattered the fabric became, in case somehow it interrupted the streak I was on.

  Once, after stumping Mike Brearley at Lord’s, my dad admitted that he didn’t know how the ball had ended up in his hands, asking himself afterwards: ‘What on earth am I doing here?’ He was in the zone, the state in which you’re so absorbed in what you’re doing that everything comes so automatically and you can’t explain it. You’re barely conscious of what you’re accomplishing. You’re not always aware of your surroundings.

  That summer, and then the winter that followed it, became a bit like that for me.

  Somehow cricketers – perhaps the statistical element of the game encourages it – tend to have the savant’s remarkable recall for dates and detail, able to bring back in a snap how a wicket fell or how a shot went to the boundary. The weather, the condition of the pitch and sometimes even the position of the field comes back to us also. My mum will tell you about the interminable conversations she sat through, often under extreme sufferance, as my dad and his teammates went over games as though they’d been played last weekend rather than a decade or two before. My dad kept a bag of old cricket balls, each of them worn to varying degrees. He labelled none of them, but knew which belonged to what match simply from looking at the scuff marks. He could then go through the match without the need of the scorecard.

  I’ve got the same power of recall. In 2016, from Cape Town to Chennai, I can remember almost every notable ball I took or faced in every match. I always will.

  By the end of it I’d made 1,470 runs – more than any wicketkeeper in a calendar year, beating Andy Flower’s 1,045. I’d chalked up three centuries and eight half-centuries. I’d come within 12 of overtaking Michael Vaughan, whose 1,481 runs in 2002 are the most scored by an England batsman in a calendar year. I’d taken 70 dismissals – 66 catches and four stumpings – to establish another record.

  Most of the records I set during the year were on top of me and then over before I realised it. The advance publicity for my pursuit of Vaughan’s total, however, was inescapable. I knew, going into that last innings, that I needed only a modest score to overtake him. Afterwards I couldn’t believe that I’d been idiotic enough to send a leg-side half-volley towards Ravindra Jadeja, who is India’s best fielder. Nor could I believe that in the first innings, with another fifty there for the taking, I’d chipped a catch to extra cover when I’d intended simply to push for a single. I regret missing that record so much. Records are important even though you know that someone will come along and break them eventually. They’re like the hallmark on a piece of gold or silver, telling everyone the worth of it. Records aren’t subjective either. No one can dispute them the way opinions are disputed. And for as long as your name sits alongside one, you’ll be able to point to it – even when you’ve gone grey – offering proof of the sort of player you were.

  ‘Question marks gave way to exclamation marks,’ was Wisden’s generous appraisal of those performances, also referring to my
‘ingrained desire to prove critics wrong’.

  I started it, appropriately enough, on home soil.

  It’s odd to admit, at least for someone as young as I am, but I have a ‘bucket list’, and the first item on it used to be: score a Test century at Headingley. The old ground doesn’t get as many Test matches as it once did – I’d played in only one before, against New Zealand, and got into the 60s – so the chance for a hundred would have to be taken when it was there because I couldn’t be sure when, or if, I’d get another.

  We were 83 for five against Sri Lanka on another of those mornings that wouldn’t have made the cover of the Visit Yorkshire tourist brochure. It was overcast, the light dim. Alastair Cook thought afterwards that I’d taken my own pitch out with me and rolled it across the square because, he said, I ‘played so differently from anyone else’. Despite our dire position, I wanted to be aggressive without being reckless. I like to fight in a corner rather than cower in it.

  In a Twenty20 match for Yorkshire, played early on in my career, about 30 university mates came to watch me from the Western Terrace. I was sent to the mid-wicket boundary, directly in front of them. Lo and behold, I soon got an absolute skier of a catch, one of those that seems to hover in hot air, like a bird searching for prey, and takes five minutes to fall. I got under the ball, cupping my hands and planting my feet firmly in textbook fashion to take it. Then I dropped the bloody thing. There was a horrid, almost eerie silence before my mates began to cheer loudly, aware that there was no point in pretending the small disaster hadn’t happened. It counts as my most embarrassing moment in cricket.

  Some of my closest friends – seven of them to be exact – surprised me at the Test. I’d donated one of my old England shirts to each of them, which meant a few rugby players, who usually wore XXXL, forced their amply shaped frames into something at least three sizes too small for them. But I didn’t know, until the match started, that those shirts would be supplemented by ginger wigs and masks. The masks were a photograph of my face with the eyes scissored out. This group of friends, like the previous lot, were tucked near the back of the Western Terrace. I started to plug away for them. I got into the 30s briskly, reached a half-century and then moved gradually from one stage to the next – into the 60s, through the 70s and beyond the 80s. I came within sight of my hundred, so close that the luckiest of inside edges could have been enough, when we lost two quick wickets. I imagined myself stranded on 98.

  (© Lindsey Parnaby/AFP/Getty Images)

  Steven Finn came in at number ten. He’s known as the Watford Wall, a name that reflects a resolute ‘thou shall not pass’ resistance from him. He may not make many runs, but in his hands the bat is a formidably wide barrier. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll get you there,’ he said. The Wall is always eager to go for a run. At the start of the 78th over, I drove Dushmantha Chameera to short extra cover. The Wall, sensing a chance, was off almost before I hit it. His sprint flustered the fielder, who was enticed into making a rash throw towards the non-striker’s end. The ball whistled past the stumps and ended up deep into the outfield because no one had been able to back up. We scampered two runs, and suddenly my bucket list had one fewer thing on it. I liked the ‘well done’ without words that Jack Brooks promptly posted on Twitter. It was a picture of a ginger snap.

  I learnt during the Sri Lanka series how far I’d come in four years. I compared the 22-year-old who’d made his debut at Lord’s with the 26-year-old who went back there only three weeks after Headingley. Everything about me was different. Stance. Body language. Approach. Attitude. My bucket list was different too. At the top now was: score a Test century at Lord’s.

  We had been coasting on 50-odd without loss. By the time I went in, we’d sunk inexplicably to 84 for four. Nothing unsettled me. Not our parlous position. Not being dropped early on at mid-wicket. Not an lbw shout so perilous that I survived it only by the width of a hair. I’ll never forget one shot when the end of the first day was looming. It was a steer off my legs: a half-step back, a simple nudge into the lengthening shadows behind square. I watched the ball as it rolled into the wide gap towards the edge of the Grandstand, giving me one of the easiest singles of my career. I set off for it, knowing I’d have a hundred once I got to the other end. I could almost jog there rather than rush, allowing me just enough time to savour properly some of the scenes unfolding around me: the crowd standing as one in salute, the raised hands and the raised voices, my teammates clustered together behind the white railings of the balcony.

  Sky Sports filmed the moment when my name went on to the honours board. It was humbling to think this merest sliver of the place would always be mine, and more humbling still to contemplate that I’d achieved something that much more illustrious names never had, among them Brian Lara, Ricky Ponting, Sunil Gavaskar and even Sachin Tendulkar. At the close of play I walked off slowly, acknowledging the ovation from the crease to the pavilion gate and then up the steps and through the Long Room, which was dark and cool. For one brief beautiful moment it felt as though Lord’s belonged only to me.

  I know, better than some, why you have to make the absolute most of something like that.

  My mum has always urged me to go after whatever opportunities life offers. Along the way, I’ve always tried to make as many of my own as I can too. I’ve done so positively and with a wholehearted intensity. I never wanted to look back in old or even middle age and see a host of things – off the pitch as well as on it – that I could have done but didn’t, missing out because I’d stayed away or held myself back or hadn’t worked hard enough. Told I can’t – rather than won’t – achieve something, my first reaction is always to ask: ‘Why not?’

  And I’ve never needed reminding that you have to wring and squeeze every drop out of living. But I got a reminder anyway, and it devastated me.

  In April 2016 James Taylor almost died.

  It’s one of those stories that you instantly doubt the accuracy of because it seems so improbable. I told myself it couldn’t possibly be true. Surely some mistake had been made. Surely it had happened to someone else. A different James Taylor, completely unknown to me, must be sick and their identities had got confused or mixed up. Even when the sequence of events was laid out for me, the facts becoming irrefutable, I didn’t want to believe them and I struggled to take them in. He’d been preparing for a pre-season match for Notts at Cambridge University. He’d been warming up – only routine, normal stuff – when his heart began to heave abnormally. In the dressing room he began to sweat profusely and needed oxygen. Taken back to Trent Bridge, he’d collapsed at the foot of some stairs. In hospital, the doctors found his heart thumping at 265 beats per minute. The normal resting rate for adults is between 60 to 100 beats per minute. The condition is called arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy. It’s a mouthful to pronounce but it essentially means the rhythm and pumping mechanism of the heart is dangerously faulty.

  This was Titch, my dear, dear friend. He was saved only because the doctors were able to implant a defibrillator into his heart.

  I had thought Titch was as physically fit – super-fit, in fact – as anyone I’d ever known. I had assumed that we’d play beside or against one another for the next ten years and more. When the shock wore off, I remember crying. Out of relief and gratitude, just thankful that he was alive. Out of what I saw as the cruelty of it all, the fickleness and apparent randomness of fate. Titch was one of our best and brightest, several quarts of talent in a pint pot. He’s also four months younger than I am. As if I wasn’t already aware of it, here was another sign that the future – even tomorrow or next week – can have a habit of not quite turning out the way you expect it. Further proof, too, that sometimes what you consider as yours can be snatched away suddenly and without warning, becoming irrecoverably lost. His career was blossoming one moment and over the next.

  (© Author’s collection)

  I’m wary of the words ‘tragedy’ or ‘tragic’. They creep frequently into reports
about sport, attached to defeats or to describe failures that are really never more than stumbles or setbacks. Such indiscriminate overuse debases the genuine, deep meaning of those words. I don’t even like to read ‘tragedy’ or ‘tragic’ in relation to my own story, though I’ve seen them appear regularly enough in newspaper headlines about my past. For I think what really counts is always the present. What you make of it. How you respond to the hand you’re dealt. Titch has shown me that again. He’s fought back, demonstrating a courage most of us would like to possess but don’t. The doctors originally told him not to exercise. Now he’s a golf-course bandit, his talent already outstripping the generous club handicap he’s been given. And the lesson he passes on every day is something I first learnt after my dad died nearly 20 years ago.

  Life goes on. It must.

  And you have to catch happiness as it flies, enjoying it there and then and for however long it lasts.

  AFTERWORD

  I AM BLUEY

  3 January 2017, Leeds

  So a year has passed.

  I see some of it in the same way you recall a landscape as it rushes by from the window of a speeding train. It’s blurry, indistinct. But what matters stands out and comes back bright and gleaming to me, as though the images are only a day old rather than 12 months.

  My kit and my bags are already sorted and stacked. My departure for the start of another one-day series is imminent, the carousel of modern cricket always turning. Outside the sun is buried behind an ugly swell of clouds, almost as black as fresh bruising, that look full of rain. The wind is getting up too, dragging the cold with it from somewhere further north. Today, though, I’m thinking of another sky, which is clear blue, and a warmer climate in a different country. In my mind, at least, I’m 8,500 miles away. In Cape Town. Below Table Mountain, that great cathedral of rock. Batting at Newlands, which is still spotless and immaculately green, and where I feel the crowd is rooting for me. On the scoreboard, I’m on 99 again, patiently waiting for the loose ball that will take me to that hundred.

 

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